Around 2006 I met up with Bryan Derballa in SF. We had met 5 years prior when we were 17/18 years old and went skating all around town. But in 2006 it was a gloomy and wet. I was in SF to shoot skate photos and bored out of my mind, so we met for banh mi. He was telling me about being at home on a computer, coding, and excited to make a group blog website, and didn’t stay to hang out that long. I was like, what? Wtf is a blog? That sounds like the corniest nerd shit ever. I actually could not even visualize what he was talking about because I hadn’t seen anything like it before. He created lovebryan.com right when the internet was coming of age, before personal blogs were really a thing, and made a site for friends to visit and see each others’ work.

4 years later, friends in NYC would tell me it was the first website they checked every day, wishing they could be a part of it, and feeling special if a photo of them ended up on it.

I started posting to it around 2012, but in a few years, as the internet really exploded, the concept of a blog website fell by the wayside, and most members stopped sharing.

To me, the concept of a communal group blog is as valuable as it ever was. It serves as an ad-free space to share a series without the limitations and control of corporate social media. You come for your friend’s work and stay for their friends’ work.

With that said, I’m excited to announce the next chapter of our dear lovebryan group blog: